Thursday, 16 October 2008

i only looked at this because wee Cal took a notion to dress up as the Ledger Joker for a party and I'm trying to tell the wife of my bosom that the purple tailed suit is not worn by this incarnation of the character. It's a four page preview of a one-off book by Azarello and Bermejo. It looks all very overdrawn and hideous; the wine is made from the same substance as the shrimps and there's a nauseous quality to it all which I suspect is not so much intentional as the artist's normal view of the world. Note that the Joker's coat folds right over left in the universal manner of women's coats instead of that of menswear, left over right. I apologise for picking on this artist, but I see the same problem all over the place. It can happen because the artist is looking in a mirror, but the overwhelming reason in the last twenty years is that comic book artists generally speaking, though there are a few fashion plates to give exception to the rule, are the worst dressed people in the world who mostly get around in t-shirts and draw people in leotards. Editors too, otherwise somebody would have picked up the mistake. The only other explanation is that it's intentional, in which case I'm full of baloney*. But if I arrived at the pub with a coat like that, somebody would have ridiculed me, probably Evans. Everybody else in the room has their coat open, and if I had done it intentionally I'd have made sure the reader knew it by showing all the others folding the opposite way.

The earliest example of the mistake that I own is contained in a double album of Duke Ellington's 1944 Carnegie Hall concert, released in 1977. Some hippy guy in the design department thought sports coats are symmetrical and flipped the image, putting the Duke's breast pocket on the right side. We can only imagine that the great man, who has strutted the world's stages in top hat and tails, was mortified, and I say guy because I have not yet met a woman who is unfamiliar with the niceties of dress differentiation, and have met at least one who wanted to make a political issue of it:

Interestingly, he's roughly got the double breasted jacket right (in that it looks a bit awkward with the inner button correctly fastened ) other than it being the ladies cut. Perhaps he used photo reference of a woman. Also, on page three he's got the bald guy reaching into his inside suit pocket on the wrong side.

I posted the following at "The Beat". I'll post it here too (why not):

Regarding Lee Bermejo's joker coat: I get the feeling it's intentional. Take a look at the shirts on all the men. They're buttoned left to right, the correct way for a man. Perhaps Lee's take on the Joker is that the Joker would wear the jacket he wanted (whether it be for a man or woman).

Lee's art style is pretty harsh and and his shadows are almost like black shards of glass and it fits the dark tone of the story.

My beef is that the scene could have been told in two pages rather than the five it took.

to anonymous deleted,look, matey, I don't know if you're my regular heckler or a brand new one, but if you leave me an email address (by this stage i don't think I'd believe any old name you think up) I'll be glad to explain to you at length how it all works. In fact, I'll even make it the basis of a new blog essay.We might even end up liking each other.